Sentimentality toward animals is a disguised form of disdain
Evidence
In particular, our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. It is proportional to this disdain. It is in proportion to being relegated to irresponsibility, to the inhuman, that the animal becomes worthy of the human ritual of affection and protection, just as the child does in direct proportion to being relegated to a status of innocence and childishness. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration, in which we ridiculously cloak animals to the point of rendering them sentimental themselves. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 437
Categorization
- SEED: Essay angle: the sentimentalization of pets in consumer culture as a symptom of the same modernist reclusion Baudrillard traces in madness, childhood, and race — a ‘pawrent’ culture reading.
- XREF: connects to: Benevolent paternalism operates as a subtle mechanism of prejudice that antipathy-based accounts miss; The myth of the wandering animal mirrors rather than opposes capital — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 459; Romanticizing the simple folk is really romanticizing the system that oppresses them